02 FEVRIER 2018: Burnt City - Abu Sair - Larkhil -

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IRAN – Burnt City -The seventh season of archeological explorations has recently commenced in Tappeh Sadeq, one of satellite hills of the Burnt City, a UNESCO-registered site in southeast Iran. “This chapter of explorations is aimed to shed a new light on previous findings of the crafts and residential accommodation in the ancient site,” ISNA quoted Rouhollah Shirazi, director of the world heritage site, as saying on Tuesday. Human remains, vestiges of pottery vessels as well as pieces of animated designs were brought to light over the past six seasons, Shirazi said. Known as Shahr-e Sukhteh in Persian, the Burnt City is situated in Sistan-Baluchestan province that was once a junction of Bronze-Age trade routes crossing the Iranian plateau.“The Burnt City is encircled with several ancient hills and the six-meter-high Tappeh Sadeq is one of those,” Shirazi explained. Founded around 3200 BC, the Burnt City was populated during four main periods up to 1800 BC. Previous rounds of excavations showed that its residents had great skills in weaving, creating fine arts such as decorative objects, stone carving, and pottery painting. Shahr-e Sukhteh is associated with four rounds of civilization, all burnt down by catastrophic sets of fire.https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/story/Fresh_archaeological_season_starts_near_Burnt_City-SNG_108868326/

EGYPTE – Abu Sair - The antiquities ministry’s archaeological committee discovered on Thursday three burial wells carved into a rock containing funerary material, in Abu Sair, Giza, stated the ministry of antiquities. Chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector Ayman Ashmawy said that archaeological excavation works commenced in January 2017 in the area – which is located between to the north of the excavation works being carried out by a Japanese expedition, and south of excavation works conducted by a Czech expedition. Ashmawy added that the committee, chaired by the Director-General of Sakara Antiquities, Sabri Farag, discovered three burial wells containing wooden coffins, symbolic utensils, and rolls to preserve the body’s internal organs. Ashmawy explained that the first well leads to a small room containing two small rectangular coffins, made out of wood but in poor condition, with two small mummies likely to have been two birds. In addition to this, three spherical coils containing bowels of mummies were found, and 22 symbolic utensils modeled on Egyptian faience. Studies found that the lid of the first coffin was engraved with a cartouche of King Ptolemy IV, and the second coffin engraved with unclear Hieroglyphic writings. Ashmawy clarified that the second and third well contained the parts of two coffins for two birds, shaped by black resin and engraved with hieroglyphic writings of one of the Ptolemaic kings, in addition to 18 symphonic utensils.

ROYAUME UNI – Larkhil - The community that built the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Larkhill which has been dated to between 3650 to 3750 BC, pre-dating Stonehenge by 600 years may have been the architects of the Stonehenge landscape that we see today. The causewayed enclosure was uncovered in 2016 after Wessex Archaeology were commissioned by WYG on behalf of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) to undertake excavations on land adjacent to Royal Artillery Larkhill in Wiltshire. The land, on the very edge of Salisbury Plain and, immediately north of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, has been earmarked for the provision of service family accommodation under the Army Basing Programme. Project manager Si Cleggett now believes that the community who built the causewayed enclosure may have been more closely involved in the planning of Stonehenge than previously thought. Si Cleggett said: "The causewayed enclosure at Larkhill was constructed during the late Stone Age, a period of transition when our ancestors gradually moved away from a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle and embraced a farming existence where the domestication of livestock and control of agriculture began. "The communities who gathered at the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure during the Early Neolithic were there 600 years before the landscape setting of Stonehenge was conceived and may have been involved in the conceptualisation or even the creation of the landscape we see today."It is enormously fitting that thousands of years later, those that strive to protect our identity as a nation will again meet at Larkhill through the delivery of service family housing."Causewayed enclosures are variously believed to be meeting places, centres of trade and cult or ritual centres to name but a few. They are the first earthen physical manifestations of the human need to enclose special spaces in the UK and, with only 70 known examples, are comparatively rare. The Neolithic causewayed enclosure found at Larkhill was allowed to silt, was re-cut and then backfilled. During the early stages of the subsequent Beaker period a five-post alignment was driven through the now-filled ditch at the causewayed enclosure entrance on an orientation almost identical to what would later become the orientation of the stones of Stonehenge in relation to the rising and setting of the sun during solstices. At 24 hectares, the Larkhill site is the largest open area archaeological excavation ever undertaken in proximity to the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. The Larkhill site has also revealed a sequence of socio-cultural changes in burial and funerary belief systems when another transition took place − the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Beaker Period and the Bronze Age.